Obituary: Germain Hansmaennel, Beer Economist and Bon vivant

Meeting Mr Hansmaennel in his hometown of Strasbourg was always a delight. He was a keen listener, a well of knowledge and a man of strong opinions. After hours of heated and passionate discussions he would generously invite us to dinner at his son’s restaurant and offer a very special wine from his own cellar, previously set up by his grandfather and expanded by his father.

When my co-author Ernst Faltermeier and I embarked on our book project The Beer Monopoly last year, he agreed to be our sounding board. We called ourselves fortunate. Trekking to Strasbourg every other month was a bit of a slog for both of us but the rewards – intelligent debates and valuable criticisms – were worth it. Mr Hansmaennel’s comments were a guarantee of wonderfully entertaining insight, unusual turns of phrase and, always, originality and spark.

Never mind that his office – which we never saw – must have been in a state of chaos. Mr Hansmaennel would arrive with a heavy bag full of sheets of data which would spill forth onto the ground when opened. So was his car. He once dragged his Master’s certificate from the University of California at Santa Barbara out from the boot – having just rediscovered it somewhere – because he had remembered that it carried the signature of Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California who would later become US president. Although it filled him with immense pride that Rotary International had sponsored his degree in economics in the US in the 1970s, he retrospectively regarded his MA certificate more of a fun object than a fetish to be put up on a wall.

Mr Hansmaennel certainly knew his wine, but he was passionate about beer. This should not have come as a surprise as he had spent his working life in the brewing industry. He worked for Kronenbourg Brewery as an export director until taking over his family office in 1992. Not being able to let go of the brewing industry, he set up his own beer import business, selling German beer in France. Spotting that there was an opportunity for Tucher beer in the innovative packaging called CoolKeg, he took great satisfaction from the fact that he managed to secure super-premium positions for his import brands in France which were retailing for less than half the price across the river Rhine.

Nonetheless, selling beer was merely something he did instead of having a hobby. He enjoyed being a salesman. Once when we visited a brewpub, we were seated next to a man with whom Mr Hansmaennel immediately struck up a conversation about beer. As it turned out, this man was an insurance salesman. Mr Faltermeier and I placed bets on who would win: would Mr Hansmaennel walk away from the table having bought an insurance policy or would the man be converted to German beer? Most probably the latter.

When leaving his job at Kronenbourg, mergers and acquisitions in the brewing industry were just kicking off. This fascinated him. And as he set his mind to studying the first wave of globalisation, the thought struck him that it closely resembled the Monopoly boardgame: who buys which streets (i.e. countries), who builds hotels (i.e. brands), who has the best chance to win the game.

Not being one to put his observations into writing because he found writing arduous, Mr Hansmaennel designed his own Beer Monopoly boardgame which he updated each year to show where brewers could still clinch deals. Sadly, he never found the time to approach the toy and game company Hasbro to market it and so allow people in the industry to understand what globalisation was really all about.

Fortunately, he found support in the company Barth, which published his first Beer Market Leaders Report in 2002. Mr Hansmaennel went on to release 11 more reports – the last one in 2013. They can still be found on Barth’s website.

At our last meeting in August Mr Hansmaennel had just returned from his holiday home in the French Alps, a place he liked to retreat to in order to meditate over his data.

He was all fired up by his idea that the Beer Monopoly was over – “there is really nothing meaningful left to buy in the world of beer”, he said – and that the rules of the game had changed. Pleased with his own discovery, he argued that brewers were now playing Draughts or Checkers in markets, where they hold leadership positions. The point of this game is to make moves which prevent or block your opponent from making moves.

With other things on our agenda we did not elaborate on his ideas but agreed to discuss them next time we would meet. It never came to that. Mr Hansmaennel died unexpectedly from a heart attack on a business trip to Nuremberg two months later, just when our book was going into print.

Rüdiger Ruoss, the founder and organiser of the World Beer and Drinks Forum in Munich called Mr Hansmaennel an exceptional and very loveable person.

Germain Hansmaennel passed away on 25 October 2016, aged 70. He is survived by his two sons and his partner Beatrice.